While your content is important for driving organic traffic to your site, the speed of your site ensures that visitors remain on your website to view them.
If your website takes a long time to load you will see your audience bounce off to another site.
Speed Up Your Site By 70% | 5 Quick Ways To Improve Page Speed
One of the most important aspects of SEO is the speed of your website. It goes hand in hand with your website’s content.
While your content is important for driving organic traffic to your site, the speed of your site ensures that visitors remain on your website to view them.
If your website takes a long time to load you will see your audience bounce off to another site.
Slower websites can only offer a bad user experience.
Doesn’t matter how unique and insightful your content is, you won’t get any traffic if your site takes an eternity to load. This is why site optimization is as important as content optimization.
But many SEOs and website owners often overlook page speed.
If you are just starting out you might think that you have created a niche site with engaging content that looks beautiful. Everything seems perfect apart from your site speed.
But it shouldn’t matter, right? After all, you’ve spent so much time designing your website and creating compelling content that a few seconds of delay shouldn’t bother your consumers.
This is where you lose your customer.
Your audience won’t be okay to wait a couple of seconds more to let your site load properly. How would they know you have written the greatest article if your site takes an eternity to load?
Page speed is a very important Google ranking factor. So much so that Google has created PageSpeed Insight for content creators to analyze and improve their site speed.
It doesn’t matter how much effort and money you put into perfecting your SEO strategy, if you don’t pay close attention to improve your page speed it won’t be fruitful.
Why Speed Is Important For Your Website?
The speed of your website may have a significant influence on the user experience. Your page speed, in addition to your content, has a significant impact on your SERPs ranking.
If you want your content to rank high on Google SERPs, you must ensure a good user experience. Because if there’s one thing we know for certain about Google, it prioritizes user experience over anything else.
Google wants its users to have a great search experience. And the best way to do this is by providing the best search results based on the relevancy and authority of websites.
In this day and age of “Right Swipe,” human attention spans have now fallen below that of a goldfish.
People don’t want to stick around for long, whether it’s a tinder date or a slow-loading website. So unless you can get your slow loading site fixed, don’t expect much organic traffic coming your way.
A one-second delay in page loading time can result in:
- 24% Lesser page views
- 16% Drop in customer satisfaction
- 7% Fewer Conversions
- 13% Increase in bounce rate
You may use appealing headlines to entice your target audience, but you’ll only have a few seconds to persuade them to stay on your website after they click on your link.
They’ll be looking for an alternative faster than flash if they see the loading spinner going on for more than 2 seconds.
Every additional second your site takes to load will have a negative impact on your ability to engage visitors and make sales.
And if this is not enough to change your thoughts on page speed…Google has started to demote slower websites by pushing them down in the SERPs.
So if you want to rank high in the SERPs and increase conversions, you must make your website load quickly.
Why Mobile Speed Matters In SEO
Information technology has come a long way in the last 20 years. The transition from desktop computers to pocket-sized smartphones constituted a paradigm shift.
You can have all the information you need on the go. Smartphones are no longer just your communication tool. There is so much you can do with a smartphone.
The fact that we can make Google search instantly, says a lot about how we have adapted to this change and becoming more and more dependent on it.
Smartphones have become more widely available and accessible to people, even in the most distant locations.
And it’s not just everyday users who have embraced this mobile-first approach. Multibillion-dollar companies are reshaping their business models to include a mobile-first experience.
Mobile-first indexing
Google was one of several companies to embrace a mobile-first strategy.
The number of mobile searches in the United States alone was 177.8 million back in 2016. Mobile and desktop searches were largely neck and neck until mid-2018. The number of mobile searches was rising steadily.
However, by the beginning of 2020, the number of mobile searches has seen a staggering growth of almost 211 million.
Google has analyzed the search trend and decided to switch to mobile-first indexing back in 2019. This means sites that perform better on mobile devices will get more priority in search results.
Because the majority of Google Search users now use a mobile device, optimizing your website for mobile searchers has become critical to success.
Here are a few statistics that might shed some light on the importance of mobile search:
- 30% of mobile searches are location-based.
- 75% of smartphone owners use Google Search on mobile for instant needs
- 88% of searchers who use local search visit a related store within a week
- “Near me” mobile searches grew 136%
- Google process 3.5 billion searches per day
- 46 percent of product searches begin on Google
If your site is taking more than 3 seconds on mobile devices something needs to be done.
Users expect websites to load in two seconds or less. Websites that take more than 3 seconds to load can see a bounce rate of 40 percent. This can negatively affect any online business.
Especially, if you are running an e-commerce or selling some sort of products or services on your site, every additional 100ms load time can cause a 4.42% drop in conversion rates.
After Google announced mobile-first indexing, mobile site’s speed became more important than ever.
A fast mobile website doesn’t just provide a better user experience for mobile users, it also ranks high on SERPs. And ranking high is essential to increase your visibility online.
How Site Speed Influence Conversion
Websites that take too much time to load usually have bad conversion rates. Your site speeds heavily influence your conversion and page views.
A faster website will have a low bounce rate and high organic CTR.
When it comes to a good user experience, your website speed is fundamental. The more quickly your webpage loads, the greater chance you have of conversion.
Users with informational and transactional intent usually want to find answers to their search query without a delay. So understandably speed is a major concern for these users.
A recent study in consumer behavior shows that nearly 43% of shoppers expect websites to load in less than 2 seconds. And if a site takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of users will bounce off and go to the next site.
Here is how Google perceive page speed:
- Less than 1 second = perfect
- 1-3 seconds = above average
- 3-7 seconds = average
- 7+ seconds = very poor
If your website is taking more than 3 seconds to load, you are already losing half of your revenue because of 70% less conversion. You’re losing revenue, leads, and, most importantly, new clients.
Many website owners don’t even realize the amount of revenue and customers they are losing. Eventually, when Google analyzes your site and sees a high bounce rate it will automatically demote and push your website down the search result.
As you move down the search results page, your online visibility decreases, resulting in fewer clicks.
And for those who decide to stay, your sluggish load times may discourage them from returning in the future so you will lose brand value and won’t be able to acquire returning customers.
According to a recent poll, over 73 percent of online shoppers would not return to a site that performed poorly or had broken pages.
This same poll also suggested that nearly 41% of users would share their bad user experience with friends or online, and 52% of consumers indicated that fast page loading is a deciding factor to their site loyalty.
How Website Speed Influences Visibility
We have already discussed this over and over again. Your search ranking is reliant on your website speed. As page speed has become a direct ranking factor, it also can influence how easily users can find your content in the first place.
As Google rolled out the mobile-first index in mid-2019, it has become more clearer that Google prefers websites that are optimized for mobile devices. With the mobile-first index, Google has started ranking all search results based on the mobile versions of pages.
As the number of mobile searches continues to grow in a staggering manner, it is in Google’s best interest to tailor its search results to prioritize mobile users.
Mobile users prefer not to wait long for a website to load since they are seeking immediate information or to make a purchase. This is why Google favors sites that are mobile-friendly and load quickly. Sites that rank on top of SERPs are usually responsive and loads within 2 seconds.
User experience has always been a ranking factor, although it has previously solely considered desktop experience. Even if a site’s mobile experience was bad, it still had a chance to rank on page one.
This isn’t the case anymore.
After Google rolled out mobile-first indexing, pages are now indexed and ranked in SERPs depending on the relevancy, authority, and mobile experience of a website.
But how does your page speed affect your online visibility?
It’s actually rather simple…slower websites are generally relegated to the bottom of the search results. The lower your content ranks in search engine results pages, the less visible it is to users.
So if you want to improve SERPs ranking and increase visibility, there is no alternative to page speed. You need to ensure your website offers a quick and easy user experience regardless of any browser or screen size.
How To Increase Website Speed
Improving your page speed is a lot easier than you might think. Simple on-page optimization can help you improve your website speed by 70%.
You don’t need any technical knowledge to speed up your website. YOu can just follow these instructions and get your website ready for mobile users.
Improving your page speed will have a positive impact on your overall SEO and drive more organic traffic to your site. Apart from improving your SERPs position, you can also increase conversion and keep your website visitors engaged.
The best part about speeding up your site is you won’t have to spend a dime to rip these benefits. All you will need is the right combination of SEO tools and plugins to get you started.
